#peppers!

It's been a few years since I posted gardening pictures, hasn't it? This year I am growing one pepper, one heirloom tomato, one cauliflower (long story, don't ask), as well as some parsley, rosemary, and basil.

(I don't actually cook with herbs much, but I should probably make some kind of fancy pasta-and-basil thing before autumn fully sets in. And if nothing else, I should dry some of the rosemary.)

Anyway, today I harvested my first pepper. The weird gash is where I sliced away a black patch. I tasted a small bite and while it's not totally mild, it also isn't really what I'd call spicy, which generally means I coddled the plant too much. Ah well. I'm sure it will work just fine in some kind of taco-based stir fry.

Tonight I made a food! \o/

This is chicken stir fry with pepper, onion, carrot, and mushroom, as well as a... I guess honey-soy sauce with a bit of ginger and garlic? I took an internet recipe and tweaked it a bit, because I cannot be bothered to buy and grate raw ginger, nor to measure oil and butter out by the teaspoon. Also I don't like cashews so I ditched the nut topping.

This is, I believe, the first time in my 39 years of life that I have cooked anything that involved cornstarch. Previously I have only ever thickened sauces/broths with flour, almond meal, or mashed potatoes (which are a totally valid thickener for chowders, okay). I think it is also the first time I cooked anything involving mushrooms.

Gardening update!

Wow, it's been a while since I posted one of these, hasn't it? Anyway, this year I am attempting to grow the following: bell peppers (mostly red but also some leftover varicolored varietal seeds left over from prior years), jalapenos, tomatoes (the leftover tiger-stripe variety I grew last year), yellow summer squash, zucchini, and some volunteer onions.

(Note: when I say an onion is a volunteer, I mean it sprouted before I could cook it. In the winter, I tend to just chuck those in the compost. In the spring and summer, I figure I might as well pot them and see what happens.)

I may also plant some spinach, but I'm undecided on that point, particularly since I'm not sure where I'd put it.

And, of course, I continue to vaguely attempt to corral the raspberry patch. I could probably train them into three hedge-like rows if I really wanted to put in the time and effort, but honestly I cannot be bothered.

What you see above are my summer squash and my zucchini, which I planted in the ground today and gave a nice, thorough drenching. The zucchini have little bamboo stakes and the squash have green stakes, so I can remember which is which. Hopefully the markers will also let my neighbors know that these are intentional plants and should not be weeded or moved.

I'll probably post some pepper pictures over the coming week, as I move them from that seedling tray into their adult pots. What I've been doing this past week is hardening them off, because seedlings sprouted indoors are delicate babies and need some time to acclimate to the great outdoors (direct sun, wind, rain, etc.). Properly one does this in regular increments and doesn't attempt direct sunlight until the fourth day or so, but I have to work around my job schedule so my plants get rather haphazard and variable day trips (or evening trips, as the case may be).

Gardening update, part 1!

So the back porch garden is doing pretty well, all things considered. :)

My freaking third round of carrot seeds have begun to sprout. Maybe this time will be the charm and nothing will dig them up? Also on the carrot front, a couple of the plants growing from, you know, actual (albeit tiny!) carrots I harvested last autumn and then forgot about in the fridge all winter until they started to sprout, are doing amazingly well -- far better than any of my carrots managed last year (when they were repeatedly smashed flat by torrential rains). One of them even seems to be gearing up to producing a flower! I am very excited. :D

The eggplant is blooming, purple blossoms lovely as always. And being outdoors -- I forget if I mentioned this last week -- has allowed natural checks and balances to kick in, by which I mean ants and other insects seem to have eaten about 99% of the aphids. \o/

The overwintered peppers are growing cheerfully and producing buds. Even Tiny, which had lost all its leaves and looked almost entirely dead, has produced two new leaves. We shall see how far that burst of life goes.

Three of my jalapeño pots have produced two or three sprouts. The fourth... the fourth got extensively excavated by local wildlife, so I planted another batch of seeds. Then it got excavated again. I am unsure what will become of it.

The spinach is wildly enthusiastic! I did an initial, cautious round of thinning -- I don’t want to do too much too fast and then lose all the growth to marauding cats or squirrels or whatever -- but I think I am okay to do a second, slightly less cautious round this weekend. The chard I will probably leave be for the moment, since it came up more thinly to start with.

Gardening update!

In the first photo, you can see my bell peppers, two planters of carrots, one eggplant (in the blue pot near the back), and four pots where jalapenos will eventually sprout. The left carrot planter used to have two volunteer onions, but they did not deal well with being stuck inside since late winter and died. It also keeps getting dug up by local animals (squirrels? cats? raccoons?) so I have started protecting it with a screen that fell out of my upstairs neighbors’ window and which they haven’t yet come to retrieve. Hopefully this will let my third round of carrot seeds sprout successfully, argh.

In the second photo, the left planter contains a whole bunch of spinach seedlings. The right planter contains two outer rows of rainbow chard left over from last year, and a central row of spinach because I had so many spinach seeds. I will thin them sometime in this coming week.

The third photo shows the raspberries exuberantly growing up the trellises, and also in random places where I cannot readily get them to lean on the trellises, because raspberries believe in no authority but the iron fist of winter.

The fourth photo shows my baby squash! A few of my initial round of seeds did survive the three days of late frost, but I have also planted a second round of seeds which are now sprouting. Here you can see a first round survivor growing its third true leaf, and a second round sprout showing two lovely cotyledons.

Gardening update!

Today I finally had a day off when the weather was both a) warm and b) dry. (It has been SUCH a chilly, damp week here in Ithaca. We had hail on Tuesday and snow on Thursday, which is frankly a bit much.) So I finished my first round of weeding, tidied the raspberry canes a little, and planted a bunch of squash seeds.

I also took my container garden outdoors for the afternoon, which for weather-related reasons I was unable to do all this past week. They are enjoying the sun and fresh air, and if the weather forecasts are accurate, I should be able to take them out (possibly for keeps!) starting on Tuesday.

Oh, and the photo of a green stake in bare dirt? That’s a marker for the squash, because otherwise I’d never remember what was where. I put one down next to each seed deposit, for a total of... I think seven planting sites? We’ll see how many of them sprout.